Here’s some good Steam Frame news if you stream PC VR to the headset. Valve has released SteamVR Beta 2.19.1, and the headline change is better streamed image quality: sharper text, clearer colours and more detail. Valve says it applies to every streamed VR app, the SteamVR interface, desktop streaming, third-party overlays and the theater screen.
The beta went out on the evening of 2 November, and it quickly got people talking on r/SteamFrame. u/biasio95 shared it in “New SteamVR Beta 2.19.1 brings better image quality“, and u/Ecnarps followed with “Steam VR Beta 2.19.1 is a Massive Improvement“. I haven’t tried the beta myself yet, so below is what Valve’s notes say, plus what owners are reporting.
Steam Frame news: higher default streaming resolution
The biggest change for most people is the new default resolution for streamed PC VR games. According to Valve’s notes:
- The default recommended render resolution for streamed PC VR apps has gone up. It now uses a render scale of 1.5, targeting 1.4× the headset’s panel resolution.
- Steam Link no longer runs a GPU performance test to choose the recommended resolution.
- The default encoded video size on the Steam Frame has gone up from 1152 to 1216.
In the first thread, one commenter asked why the default isn’t simply the panel’s own resolution. u/biasio95 explained that a VR image loses a lot of resolution when it’s warped to correct for lens distortion, so rendering above the panel resolution helps. They added that 1.4× the panel resolution is a good ballpark for any headset, though results can vary.
Sharper colours, text and peripheral detail
Valve has also reworked how the image is prepared before it’s encoded and sent to the headset:
- A higher-quality filter is now used to downsample colour before encoding, so fine coloured details are kept.
- Brightness is better preserved at edges between strongly saturated colours.
- The periphery is sharper, thanks to higher-quality downscaling outside the foveated region.
- Text and UI are crisper throughout SteamVR, including the dashboard, third-party overlays, the theater screen and SteamVR Home.
- A new system-layer rendering pipeline renders the foveated and non-foveated views straight from their source textures. That removes an intermediate render texture and an extra resampling step.
If you want to see the difference for yourself, Valve has added a way to compare. On the host PC, go to Steam Link > Advanced > Stream Quality and choose Default or Legacy. Legacy reproduces the old streaming image quality.
Set your settings back to Auto
This is the bit I’d pay most attention to. If you’ve manually changed Steam Link’s encoded video size or render resolution, SteamVR keeps your settings. That means you won’t get the new defaults until you set them back to Auto. Lots of Frame owners tweaked these early on, so it’s worth checking.
In u/Ecnarps’ thread, u/whiskyrox also suggested setting Overlay Render Quality back to Auto if you’d lowered it, as that made a big difference to how visible the foveated area was for them. Valve says that setting now uses improved filtering and has a new Ultra option.
How to opt into the SteamVR beta
- On your PC, open your Steam Library and find SteamVR.
- Right-click it, open Properties and go to the Betas section.
- Opt into the beta and let SteamVR update to 2.19.1.
- Valve’s own SteamVR beta instructions cover this as well.
In the threads, owners said the update is on the PC side, and u/pzmn3000 noted the Frame itself was still on 2.18.2. One commenter did say both should be on the beta, so if something looks off, check the headset too. Valve asks for bug reports in the SteamVR Bug Report forum rather than in replies to the announcement.
Using a Steam Machine as your PC VR host
If your Steam Machine is the PC you stream from, the Linux changes in this beta matter too. SteamVR now runs under the Sniper runtime and supports Steam Runtime 3 clients. Non-Proton OpenXR games can launch without SteamVR already running, and the OpenVR and OpenXR runtimes can now run inside Flatpak, bubblewrap and other sandboxes. All Render Quality options are now available on Linux, whereas high quality samplers were disabled before.
There’s also a new symlink for the 32-bit OpenXR runtime, which Proton can use as well. That pairs nicely with the 32-bit OpenXR support in my GE-Proton11-12 roundup.
Other streaming and OpenXR changes
- A new Preferred Foveated Sharpness (System UI) option under Steam Link on your PC sets the size of the sharp area for the SteamVR interface.
- Per-application refresh rate overrides.
- Improved head motion prediction, and better eye-tracked foveation alignment during rapid head movement.
- When you connect an eye-tracking headset, SteamVR now asks whether to share eye-tracking data with PC apps.
- Fixes for frame timing at startup, a possible cause of Error 17, and IPv4 and IPv6 address comparisons when picking network links.
- OpenXR: XR_KHR_composition_layer_cylinder on PC and Steam Frame, XR_FB_composition_layer_image_layout on Steam Frame, and XR_EXT_stationary_reference_space.
What Steam Frame owners are saying
Early impressions are very positive. u/Ecnarps said the difference is significant even on the desktop, with colours that pop more, better-looking blacks and a sharper image, and called it very close to what they got from Virtual Desktop. u/1ii1i said desktop streaming used to be a blurry mess and is now completely legible. u/Jmcgee1125 reported bitrate reaching 300Mbps in a Half-Life: Alyx test scene, compared with around 150Mbps before.
It’s not perfect for everyone. u/Arstulex said they can now spot the foveated region when looking around their desktop, and u/biasio95 suggested widening the UI foveation radius if it bothers you. u/jeembobs noticed more positional “swimming” of UI elements when viewing desktops in SteamVR.
My thoughts
This feels like one of the most important updates for the Frame since launch, because image quality has been a common complaint in the community. With more owners joining every month, as my look at the October Steam Frame survey showed, it’s good to see Valve working on it. If you missed the previous release, here’s my rundown of the SteamVR 2.18 update. Let me know in the comments how the beta looks on your Frame.
